Has Rishi been rumbled?

Poor Rishi Sunak. Within two months the Chancellor has gone from someone confident enough to publicly rebuke the Prime Minister over his choice of words to someone who merely seeks to ape them.

‘I wouldn’t have said it,’ Sunak grandly told a press conference at the start of February when asked about Boris Johnson’s jibe that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile. That intervention came just minutes after Johnson had suffered the resignation of his policy chief Munira Mirza, whose husband is a close friend of Sunak’s.

Events were on such a trajectory that much of Westminster, possibly including Sunak himself, expected him to be ushering in yet another new Tory era by now in the wake of Johnson’s defenestration.

But it didn’t happen. Instead, it is Sunak who has lost face and status. So much so that when asked a disarmingly simple question about what a woman is by the radio broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer this week, all he could think to reply was: 

‘I thought the Prime Minister answered this brilliantly in PMQs this week and I fully agree with him…I would exactly agree with what the Prime Minister said…look at the full thing that he said.